by Amanda McCann, staff writer
Over the summer, a redesign committee will convene to discuss ideas for making PPSC’s downtown campus a more desired location for students to enroll in. The project, which began in March, is currently in the information gathering stage of bringing a larger student population to the campus located in the heart of Downtown Colorado Springs.
Professor Wayne Artis, who has taught history at the downtown campus since 2001, is one of the heads of the redesign project. “We’re located in a thriving downtown, and yet our enrollment has really sunk dangerously low,” he says. “We not only need to rebuild enrollment downtown, but we need to also really connect the downtown campus with our downtown neighbors and potential partners.” He says this process won’t happen over a few months but will be a continued process that may take three to five years to complete.
“I think part of what we’re thinking about is how do we become more visible in downtown,” says Chief of Staff, Jim Mancall. “Downtown is changing. How are we more engaged? Not only with downtown, but with the broader Colorado Springs area,” he says.
The Downtown Campus, which first opened in 1986, has become the home to the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences programs. One of the goals for the future is to make it the permanent location for all courses offered within these programs.
“The idea is to create more of a sense of community around those programs,” says Mancall. “So, you’re here, you meet other students who have similar interests, right? Does that ultimately create more of a sense of, ‘hey this is my campus, this is where the things I’m interested in happen, where my friends hang out.’ That’s a new effort getting underway.”
The team stresses through their website that closing the campus downtown is not an option.
On April 3rd and April 24th, Town Hall meetings were held for students and community members to provide feedback and ideas. You can access the recordings of those meetings here.
There are also plans to hold future focus groups with students and faculty.
“We really want to make this a very, very open process.” says Artis. “I think that there is some frustration on the part particularly of faculty of downtown that we’ve neglected the downtown campus. So, we want to really make an effort to be totally open about this.”
For more information regarding the redesign project, you can access the Redesign Project Website at the link provided above.